


I walked with you once upon a dream

by mndalorians



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: F/M, Threat of violence but very tame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:10:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26250139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mndalorians/pseuds/mndalorians
Summary: The Mandalorian gets more than he bargained for when he takes a bounty a little further afield than what he is used to.
Relationships: The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/Reader, The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/You
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22





	I walked with you once upon a dream

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first fic from way back in May but I'm choosing to post my work chronologically (and any roughness can be blamed on that). This fic uses she/her pronouns for the reader but the majority of my stuff is gender neutral.

High stake bounties had been few and far between of late in Din’s corner of the Outer Rim. What was on offer was reasonable if you were only looking after yourself, but with the covert and the Razor Crest to think about, Din was close to collapsing with the number of bounties he had brought in recently (a guild record perhaps if anyone bothered to keep track of such trivial matters). Still, no matter how many smugglers or escaped convicts he brought in, Din needed more credits, so he snapped up the chance to head further afield with the promise of a higher return and the chance to slow down, just a little bit.

Greef Karga’s eyes had lit up when, after offering up however many vagabonds, petty criminals and their ilk, Din gave a frustrated sigh as he sat away from the table’s edge and asked if Karga had anything that would actually be worth his time.

‘There is one,’ he grinned, pulling a puck from the inside of his jacket. ‘Twenty thousand credits if you can bring her in.’

Karga set the puck down and activated the hologram. The bust of the bounty flickered to life above it, showing a human woman. She looked kind, Din thought, soft. She didn’t have the harsh stare characteristic of the Outer Rim’s more unsavoury crowds, the one earned after the darkest parts of life become a mundane reality in the fight to survive in a world that didn’t really want you. No, her bright eyes suggested that she was still hopeful of there being light somewhere in the galaxy.

Din continued to stare at the hologram. ‘Why the high bounty? She doesn’t look that bad.’

‘The client didn’t say, but she’s force sensitive.’

Din’s eyes flicked up to Karga behind his helmet, the visor cutting the man off across his forehead. She was dangerous then, despite what Din had initially thought of her. What he knew about force users was limited to the horror stories of people driven mad by their abilities that had trickled back to him, but it was enough to know to be wary. Din tapped his thumb against the tabletop, weighing up the risk and reward. Then finally: ‘alright, I’ll take it.’

Karga beamed. No one else must have been willing to take him up on the job, no matter how high the reward. ‘She was last seen in the Cademimu sector, apparently. You might want to start there.’

Din gave a nod of thanks as he swiped the puck from the table and left the cantina without another word.

*

Ajan Kloss was, in a word, hot. In two words, stiflingly hot. Upon opening the Crest’s hatch, Din had promptly turned around to dump his cape by his bed, pulling on a light cowl to cover his neck instead. It made little difference though as he picked his way through the thick underbrush of the forest planet; sweat collected in the creases of his under shirt and trousers, on the nape of his neck and, worst of all, on his forehead, threatening to run down to his eyes. The only relief from that was that the tracking fob’s beeping strengthened with each passing minute. It was a fluke of luck that Din had landed on the green moon in the first place, out of every other planet in the sector, never mind that his first landing had presumably left him within walking distance of the bounty.

About thirty minutes from the Crest, Din came upon a cabin in a clearing. It was a comfortably small size for one person, which he hoped meant only the bounty would be around. He paused before stepping out in the open but all he could hear were birds calling to one another in the canopy above. He broke away from the trees and strode towards the cabin’s porch. The quicker he caught and neutralised the bounty, the sooner he could relax without fear of anyone poking in his head. Din really didn’t want to know what made force users so special.

He didn’t bother knocking. No one who lived in such isolation ever expected visitors. He pushed the door open to reveal a modest little living space, illuminated by sunlight streaming in through overhead windows. It didn’t look like the home of a wanted criminal, not when scores of drawings and paintings hung on the walls, and plants found their way into the available spaces between the furniture, as if the greenery outside wasn’t enough. He checked the few rooms that branched off from the main living space, sure to keep his footsteps quiet, but all turned up empty. Din retreated to the front of the cabin, toeing the numerous rugs spread about the floor for a hidden basement as he went. No luck.

Back in the humid air Din circled around the cabin, careful to stay close to its walls until another cabin came into view, directly behind and a little smaller than the first, tucked into the treeline. The bounty had to be in there, the persistent beeping from the tracking fob earlier had been too strong for her to be anywhere else. Again, he didn’t bother knocking as he opened the door.

If Din didn’t know any better, he was sure he died the moment he stepped foot in that cabin. How else could he explain the fact his heart convulsed in his chest and his lungs seized up, denying him the breath that might have steadied his racing mind because all he could see was himself. The emotion – so full and consuming to pull any specific one out – that drowned him in that first heart stopping moment washed away, leaving only a feeling of terror that sent tremors through his otherwise stiff muscles. He wanted to run, he wanted to scream, he wanted to black out or turn around and forget all about the bounty, because how in the galaxy could his face be there on the canvases in front of him?

There was shuffling just behind a cluster of canvases resting against a wooden post. Din’s hand flew to his blaster but didn’t pull it from its holster. Another painting had caught his attention, though it was the most unrecognisable to Din, for the simple reason that he was smiling in it, a broad grin dimpling his cheeks.

He didn’t have time to dwell on it though, not when a woman appeared from behind the canvases, cup in hand and wearing an apron over a loose-fitting shirt. She started at the sight of him, lurching back with a gasp as she tried to keep her drink in the cup. What surprised Din though was the knife hurtling towards him, just within his peripheral. He ducked his head, raised his arm to deflect it, but the clash of metal against metal never came. He lifted his head after a moment to see a tool that resembled a handheld spade more than a knife hanging in the air, pointed at his throat.

Ah, he thought, he hadn’t known they could do that.

He eyed the blade. ‘That’s not exactly sharp.’

It moved closer. ‘Doesn’t need to be to do some damage.’ She countered, her warning as loud as a blaster shot through silence.

Din’s gaze flicked back to her. She looked exactly as she had in the hologram, save for a smear of blue paint on her cheek that matched a streak on the back of her hand. Din would have said she was pretty if he ever admitted such things to himself. He jerked at the thought, reminded himself why he was standing in the cabin in the first place. Her looks were an asset, like the petals of a flower concealing the thorns beneath. Get too close and he could be another story told around cantina tables. But… there was something about her, something he couldn’t pin down, not when his heart was thundering in his chest, sure to clang off his cuirass if it beat any harder, and his face staring back at him, muddling any coherent thought in his head.

In the silence of their stare down, he let his eyes wander, though he was careful to keep his visor facing her. If he focused on the portraits, he didn’t need to focus on the way the woman’s eyes were searching him. There was one behind her, the only pencilled sketch and the only one taped to the wall, that caught his eye. It was much more smudged than the rest, a profile that only managed to capture the shape of his nose and jaw, the rest of his features hidden behind a murky layer of lines drawn and erased, then drawn and erased again and again. The lines that remained throughout the mess seemed chaotic in their creation – as if a crazed hand had been desperate to commit them to something more solid and permanent than a passing stroke of inspiration. They were drawn over and over again, thick enough for Din to easily pick them out from where he stood and certainly indenting the paper with the force behind them.

The canvases scattered across the studio seemed to stretch out from that singular drawing, the comedown from that initial shock clearing Din’s head just enough to pick up the finer details of the room. Messy abstractions materialised into eyes, lips, hair, all true to Din’s mirror back in the Crest’s refresher, as his eyes moves across the room. Those closer to Din appeared more confident in their muse and he was close enough to one to see the tiny brushstrokes that made up the hair curling across his forehead, his eyelashes, his stubble, all coming together to make life out of the paint.

He cracked.

‘How—why have you got so many paintings of me?’ He managed to croak out.

The blade eased away from his throat, just slightly, as the woman’s eyes widened. Her eyes darted between the paintings (those between the two of them at least, conscious not to turn away from him), taking them all in before landing back on Din.

‘That’s you?’

The incredulity in her tone sparked something inside Din, because who else could it be when the face that stared at him most mornings was staring at him right then and there, but the reminder that only he knew his face dampened that spark rather quickly. Despite the evidence surrounding him that someone else did in fact know his face, how did she know it? Din nodded after a beat of silence. He didn’t trust his voice. She took a tentative step forward.

‘Who are you?’ She asked, brows dropping and knitting together. ‘I’ve been seeing you in my dreams for months now, but if you’re a Mandalorian, then I can’t have seen your face…’ She drifted off as she edged closer, stopping just out of Din’s reach. The blade had been set back on a table and it would have been so easy to just grab and stun her against his vambrace, haul her back to the ship and forget all about the room where he stared back at himself. But he didn’t. He remained as stoic as he could as her gaze moved across his visor. Where others could only guess at what lay beneath it, he imagined she was placing those dreams behind the helmet, toying with ideas over his expressions rather than his features. Din let out a shaky breath at the thought.

‘What’s your name?’ She whispered, finding her first question unanswered. She had moved forward and was so close now; Din would barely need to move his arm to touch her. Was this how close she needed to be to slip into his mind, drive him mad like the whispers in cantinas said she could? He waited, but she only blinked up at him. She might have known his face, but he was damned if he was going to completely give himself up to a stranger, a bounty no less, no matter the inexplicable draw he felt towards her.

‘Mando’.

‘Well, Mando,’ she said his name with a quirk of her lips, like it was a secret shared between the two of them, ‘what do you know about solmas?’


End file.
